A reminder of the rationale for investment capital into corporate imperialism companies:
Companies were encouraged to seek growth at all costs and worry about profitability later, not an unheard-of strategy but one that could now be pushed to new extremes. Uber could burn through billions in cash for about 15 years, bending the market, smashing local regulations and monopolies, altering consumer behavior in the process, and then go public at an $82.4 billion valuation while losing $800 million a quarter.
The article links back to a similliarly damning piece from 2021 that hints at this entire ecosystem subsidizing millennial and gen z lifestyles whereby all of our behaviors and monetary attitudes towards expectations from companies like Uber, Netflix, etc. shift indefinitely.
Where do we go from here? It’s not like this line of thinking has changed in any material way over the past two decades; if anything, this is the norm, and the gambles are ever more macro in nature.
Anyway, there are a few other nuggets to glean from NYT’s assessment of the vast Netflix’s library, including commentary of the long tail of hours viewership and why certain titles may or may not have benefited from inter-country licensing and the inclusion in popular algorithmic groupings of streamable video. A question for Netflix is whether its model is actually similar to Uber’s or not: has it truly changed our video watching behavior beyond the initial SVOD (streaming video on demand) model shift with its immense library of choice in a “traditional” video format, or… are behaviors fundamentally changing again with the verticalization of video and hours spent on platforms like TikTok? Usage is almost the same between younger generations, so perhaps it’s a combination of time spent across the two complementary platforms.
Behaviorally, you could argue there is less friction to tap open TikTok and scroll (most similar to the early days of linear, live TV) than parsing through millions of titles deciding on what to watch (the Netflix model).